


Feel The Great Dividing

by UniverseOnHerShoulders



Series: Take Me To The Stars [6]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/F, Post-Episode: s11e05 The Tsuranga Conundrum, Self-Reflection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-18
Updated: 2018-11-18
Packaged: 2019-08-25 12:11:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16660933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UniverseOnHerShoulders/pseuds/UniverseOnHerShoulders
Summary: She's asked Clara this question before, and received an honest answer. But has that answer changed now, given everything that's changed between them?





	Feel The Great Dividing

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was inspired by Astos's words in _The Tsuranga Conundrum_ , and the Doctor's ensuing realisation that she can at times be selfish.

“Am I a good woman?” 

The question comes from nowhere one evening, well after closing time, as the darkness outside seems to creep in and the fluorescent lights gleam off the chrome fixtures inside. The Doctor is perched on the counter-top as Clara mops the chequered expanse of the diner floor, half-lost in the rhythmic motion of bucket to linoleum and back again. 

It’s a blurted question; a question which bubbles from the Time Lady’s mouth before she can stop it, and it’s said with enough urgency that Clara knows she’s been dwelling on it for some time. She’s heard these questions – this exact question, in fact – before, and she knows that they captivate the mind of the Doctor with a vice-like grip, indicative of a struggle she cannot see and will not be made party to until the words spring forth unbidden. 

“Of course you are,” she hums, lifting the mop back to the bucket and dunking it in the tepid water with a rising sense of trepidation she attempts to allay with humour. “You’re an excellent woman. You’ve been a fast learner, even if the bra thing took a while.” 

“No,” the Doctor mumbles, and that’s unlike her enough that Clara stops what she’s doing and looks over at her partner, sat with her back hunched over and her head in her hands. The Doctor doesn’t mumble. The Doctor shouts. The Doctor asserts. The Doctor speaks with confidence. She doesn’t mumble; not unless something is seriously wrong, and her muted tone is enough to elevate her worry levels from moderate to sky-high. Unbidden, Clara’s mind flicks back to the previous week, and the woman who had returned to her from onboard a Tsuranga craft, her body ostensibly healed but the memory of pain driving her to Clara’s arms in search of solace as she wept. “No, that wasn’t… that isn’t…” 

“What’s wrong?” Clara asks, leaning her mop against the wall and then pulling herself up to sit beside the Time Lady. There’s a strategic height advantage up here that they both enjoy, and as Clara slips an arm around the Doctor’s waist, she’s grateful for the fact that they can both sit side by side, without the enforced distance that might have come from opting for a rickety stool instead. “What’s happening in that head of yours? Hey?”

The Doctor leans into the embrace, resting her head against her companion’s shoulder and exhaling slowly. There’s no rush. There’s never any rush between them; the curse and the blessing of two women who have all the time in the world to think and to strive for clarity of explanation. Clara’s hand lifts and settles on the Time Lady’s cheek, and the two of them sit in silence for a long moment, the Doctor’s thoughts ticking away with a near-tangibility that Clara knows all too well. She can’t push. She can’t force anything. She can only wait with composed readiness for the incumbent gravitas of whatever is about to be brought into being with words. 

“I asked you once,” the Doctor says eventually, leaning into Clara’s palm and sighing softly. “I asked you if I was a good man.” 

“I remember.” Clara recalls another TARDIS, another Doctor, and another her. A version of her whose heart still beat, and a version of the Doctor who was as unlike this one as it was possible to be. It was a conversation that he had needed to have to find his own path, and a conversation she can tell that this Doctor needs just as much.

“And you… you were gentle with me, as always. You didn’t know the new me; you didn’t have any evidence to base your appraisal on. But you told me that I tried to be a good man, and that that was the point.” 

“I knew you,” Clara reminds her, offering her partner a warm smile. “I _know_ you, present tense. I’ve seen all of you, remember? Every life, every face, every choice. And I knew from that that you were, at heart, a good man.” 

“Am I _still_ a good person? Even now?”

“Why are you asking me this?” Clara asks gently, empathy beginning to course through her veins as she realises that her partner has been agonising on this matter for some time. “What’s brought this on?”

“Just… please. Tell me: am I?” 

“Has someone indicated that you’re not? Was it one of the team? What’s been said?” 

“No!” the Doctor pulls away, blinking at Clara with the kind of aghast horror that underlines the veracity of her words, and Clara at once regrets her question. “No, not them – no! They would never…” 

“I’m sorry,” Clara murmurs, holding up her hands submissively, knowing at heart that Graham, Yaz and Ryan would never make such an assertion. “I just… I need to know why you might think that about yourself. I need to know what’s happened. I can’t be honest with you when I only have a fragment of the whole story. I need the whole book.” 

“Things seem… different now.”

“In what sense?”

“In the sense that before, if I made a mistake, it wasn’t a character fault. It didn’t cast aspersions on my aptitude, or my abilities. But now? Now, one wrong move and that’s it. I’m written off as a bad person. It’s like… like that defines me to other people, and then it defines me in my head, because I can’t move past the things I’ve done,” the Doctor’s face crumples, and she looks so broken that Clara feels her own heart break in sympathy. “I can’t stop thinking about everything I’ve done and said. Every night… every single night, it’s like a trial by my own subconscious. I just lie there and replay everything over and over and over again.” 

“Why haven’t you woken me?” Clara asks, taking the Doctor’s hand and squeezing it reassuringly. “I’d be a witness for the defence.” 

The Doctor smiles a little then, as intended. “You haven’t borne witness to some of the things I’ve done, Clara. If you had, you’d leave me. Worse; you’d despise me.”

“I know you,” Clara reminds her for the second time in as many minutes, wishing she could alleviate the Doctor’s pain and make her believe that her love for her was neither conditional nor alterable. “Every part of you, throughout all of time.” 

“You know the _outline_ of me, but not the horrors of it all – the crimes I committed, or the things I did in the name of my people. You know about the War, but you don’t know the people I’ve killed. You don’t see their faces, or recite their names into the darkness. Some of them… god, I see them every day, especially the children. I hear their screams. I remember how they cried. And I… oh, Clara, the things I would give to be human so that death actually meant the end and not having to live with the memory of their suffering. Is that selfish? Is it selfish to want to be free of their memory? For so long it’s been a duty and an obligation but I… I don’t know if I can bear that weight any longer.” 

“You did what you had to do,” Clara skims her thumb over the back of the Time Lady’s hand. “You survived the War, and now you’re doing what you believe to be the right thing.” 

“At what cost?” 

“Doctor, you’re here. You’re alive.” 

“At what cost?” she repeats hollowly, her eyes staring unseeingly at Clara as she relives some past horror that Clara cannot begin to fathom. “What price have I paid for my life?” 

“You are not a bad person for committing acts of war in a time that required it,” Clara says in a soft voice, recalling the time she had assured a different Doctor in a different building the same thing. “You are not a bad person for surviving, or for doing what was needed to help. If that was the wrong thing in a day, a week, a month, a lifetime’s time, then it was still the right thing when you did it. I know you. I know you didn’t do those things lightly, or out of malice. But you don’t have to bear the burden of them until eternity.”

“It’s my duty to remember.”

“No,” Clara shakes her head. “No, it isn’t.”

“I should have burned with my people. That would have been the noble thing to do; instead I fled like the coward I am.” 

“No,” Clara says more firmly. “You can’t think like that, because it isn’t true. Think of all the people whose lives you’ve saved since that time. All the people who’ve cared about you. Think how bereft we would be without you. I’d be… well, I’d be dead.” 

“No, you wouldn’t,” the Doctor swallows thickly, turning her head away and continuing in a tremulous voice: “You’d be alive, and with Danny. You’d probably have three perfect children and a Labrador, and you’d be happy back on Earth.” 

“I’m happy here and now, with you.”

“Happy with a war criminal?”

“Stop it,” Clara snaps, her patience dissolving in the face of the Doctor’s self-pity. “Stop this thought process, now.” 

“I…” the Doctor looks up at her then for what seems to be the first time, blinking as though unaware she had been speaking aloud. “I’m sorry.”

“What?” 

“I’m sorry, I just…I get caught up and I do bad things.” 

“I promise you, you’re not a war c-”

“I get caught up in my own sadness and it makes me selfish – Astos told me before and I didn’t want to listen. I didn’t want to believe it because I was so convinced that I was doing the right thing; sometimes I forget… I lose sight of things…” 

“Doctor.” 

“You shouldn’t be with me, Clara. I’m not good for you.” 

“Doctor.” 

“You should just… no, I should just go,” she makes as if to hop down, and Clara wraps both of her arms around the Time Lady’s waist, anchoring her in place against her will. “Let me go, Clara. It’s for the best, I’m only dragging you down.”

“No, you aren’t, and no, it isn’t,” Clara shakes her head. “You can’t see it, can you? And other people can’t either, because they don’t see the good in you. If they do see it, they don’t factor the goodness and the kindness in – they just see you make a mistake and that becomes their fixation. That’s wrong of them, Doctor. They can’t see the wood for the trees, and nor can you. If you do something bad, that doesn’t make you a bad person. If you do something bad and you spend your time concerned with making sure it doesn’t happen again – that’s… well, to be blunt, that’s human, and that’s doing the right thing. If you had done the things you had and held no remorse, and made no effort to change? _Then_ you would be bad. But you’re not a bad person.” 

“I…” 

“No. The man I fell in love with was not a bad man. The man I stopped from destroying Gallifrey was not a bad man. The man you became was not a bad man when he destroyed the Daleks, or shot the General. And the woman you are now is not a bad woman. You’re learning. You’re growing. And I love you. Unconditionally and wholly.”

“Clara…” 

“No. I do. Don’t you dare try to tell me that I don’t, or that any of us would be better off without you, because it isn’t true. Without you, I would be bereft. Hell, I _was_. Until you found me again, I was just… surviving. I was making do and getting by. And then you walked in here and it was like coming back to life. It was like a second chance.”

“ _Third_ chance,” the Doctor notes quietly, looking up at her partner with a nervous little smile. “Your third chance.” 

“I need you to accept that you are loved, and you are kind, and you might sometimes lose your way, but don’t we all? There’s no such thing as perfection, so stop trying.” 

“I don’t know,” the Doctor shrugs shyly. “There’s you.” 

“You’re a sap. Are you listening to me?”

“I always listen to you, Clara.”

“So listen when I tell you that you aren’t bad. You’re the antithesis of bad. And I love you.”


End file.
